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Alan Watts: Money, Guilt, and the Machine

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Re: Alan Watts: Money, Guilt, and the Machine

#31

Post by kordless »

bachback wrote: post #21
jnbiche wrote: post #3

"We must recognize then that money is a pure abstraction." Yes, this is a fact that people in the Bitcoin, and recently, Dogecoin communities have come to realize. I think this realization is a gift that cryptocurrencies could bring to the general population. There's nothing magical about a US Dollar. It's a unit of account, nothing more. If you really want to fall down the rabbit hole, then learn about the (original…

wrong. bitcoin has a smart contract system in it. its not just a unit of account. ripple is about as good as eGold. actually Watts had tremendous foresight when he says here: " And one of the reasons that our technology is impeded and prevented from feeding the world properly is the failure of one of our networks. It's an information network and it's called money" here we are, and now money is a network.

You should be more specific when negating things. I don't parse anything that jnbiche said as an incorrect assumption.

Ripple provides a market exchange methodology, among other things. Bitcoin can't do that natively due to the lack of looping in its scripts.

Also, check out Ethereum. If they pull it off, it'll twist your noodle with the possibilities.

Re: Alan Watts: Money, Guilt, and the Machine

#33

Post by dangle »

dominotw wrote: post #24

I am part of couple of Alan Watts discussion groups on facebook and reddit. I saw a HUGE surge of interest in all these groups. Is it because of the movie Her?

Watts has experienced a general surge in the past few years or so-- I'd attribute it to the growing number of Youtube videos featuring audio of his lectures. The 'What if Money Were no Object' video in particular was passed around a lot in art communities and college campuses about two years ago. Trey Parker and Matt Stone animated some of his lectures, adding to the surge as well. Also, the band The Books prominently features Alan Watts samples in their music too, which is how I was introduced.

Re: Alan Watts: Money, Guilt, and the Machine

#34

Post by jnbiche »

bachback wrote: post #21
jnbiche wrote: post #3

"We must recognize then that money is a pure abstraction." Yes, this is a fact that people in the Bitcoin, and recently, Dogecoin communities have come to realize. I think this realization is a gift that cryptocurrencies could bring to the general population. There's nothing magical about a US Dollar. It's a unit of account, nothing more. If you really want to fall down the rabbit hole, then learn about the (original…

wrong. bitcoin has a smart contract system in it. its not just a unit of account. ripple is about as good as eGold. actually Watts had tremendous foresight when he says here: " And one of the reasons that our technology is impeded and prevented from feeding the world properly is the failure of one of our networks. It's an information network and it's called money" here we are, and now money is a network.

What did I say that is wrong?

Oh, and Ripple is very different from eGold since it's peer-to-peer and open source. Most importantly, Ripple allows payments to "ripple" through people until they reach the end target. All this is very different from eGold, a centralized, closed-source payment processor.

Ripple themselves doesn't hold any currency except for the base XRP (Ripple) unit of account, which they require for opening an account, transactions, and various other actions.

I agree that RippleLabs has poorly distributed this XRP they created as their system's base currency. This has left them open to accusations of scam(not really) and greed(totally), which is too bad given the incredible technology Ripple offers. RippleLabs has also done a pretty poor job marketing their increasingly advanced technology.

In the end, Ripple can happily co-exist with Bitcoin, and offers solutions to many of the problems Bitcoin will soon face (such as transaction load). But I don't see this happening unless the cryptocurrency community decides to approach Ripple with an open mind, and unless RippleLabs puts down the arrogance and actively communicate with the community.

Signed,

A dedicated Bitcoiner since winter 2010/2011

Re: Alan Watts: Money, Guilt, and the Machine

#35

Post by jnbiche »

kordless wrote: post #31
bachback wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wrong. bitcoin has a smart contract system in it. its not just a unit of account. ripple is about as good as eGold. actually Watts had tremendous foresight when he says here: " And one of the reasons that our technology is impeded and prevented from feeding the world properly is the failure of one of our networks. It's an information network and it's called money" here we are, and now money is a network.

You should be more specific when negating things. I don't parse anything that jnbiche said as an incorrect assumption. Ripple provides a market exchange methodology, among other things. Bitcoin can't do that natively due to the lack of looping in its scripts. Also, check out Ethereum. If they pull it off, it'll twist your noodle with the possibilities.

You've probably checked out colored coins and counterparty, too. They both already have working implementations of secondary markets on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. Colored coins has two GUIs, and counterparty has a command line client with a simplified GUI, and more GUIs on the way.

Both of these projects are very alpha, so anyone checking them out should only use money you can afford to lose until they're out of beta (and the devs of both projects are pretty responsible about this, I believe).

I'm a little skeptical of Ethereum. It's notoriously difficult to build sandboxed virtual systems for browsers, much less for payment/asset exchange systems. And the money they raised with no working prototype is somewhat obscene (I think the typical HN start-up would have a conniption fit if they learned how much they raised, and still maintained ownership). But it is an incredibly cool idea. We'll see.

Re: Alan Watts: Money, Guilt, and the Machine

#36

Post by jnbiche »

anon4 wrote: post #5
jnbiche wrote: post #3

"We must recognize then that money is a pure abstraction." Yes, this is a fact that people in the Bitcoin, and recently, Dogecoin communities have come to realize. I think this realization is a gift that cryptocurrencies could bring to the general population. There's nothing magical about a US Dollar. It's a unit of account, nothing more. If you really want to fall down the rabbit hole, then learn about the (original…

Can you summarize here what the original concept was and how it differs from the current implementation? I couldn't really understand that from just the wikipedia page.

The original concept of Ripple was simple: you and your friends float your own "currencies". But who will accept your currency outside your small circle of friends?

Well, the ripple concept comes from the system's ability to "ripple" payments across networks of different asset holders, at rates set by the users and/or exchange markets that the system permits.

It's pretty amazing to see how well it works in real life.

https://classic.ripplepay.com/about/ https://ripple.com/

Re: Alan Watts: Money, Guilt, and the Machine

#37

Post by fexl »

jacobparker wrote: post #29
fexl wrote: post #18

In the South Pacific island story, when the gold was lost, the money was lost. That was a loss of a physical substance with a unique combination of specific physical characteristics. If it had been silver, copper, platinum, rhodium, or iron, I doubt they would have said "Oh well, we didn't really lose anything." The loss was real. Some say that gold is useless, but I find it hard to imagine that any substance which i…

I'm not sure if you intend to directly reply to TFA. Mr. Watts does dedicate a sentence to that fact (Ctrl-F "It has some value for industry [...]" - the weakness of his assertion can probably be excused based on his profession and thesis) but the point he was trying to make was that losing the gold is not something that should gum up the rest of the economy.

I did see that comment. However, I was addressing Mr. Watt's conclusion from the story: "What this means then is that money is nothing but bookkeeping."

I disagree. What that story means is that the people were left holding paper certificates worth exactly nothing.

It is true that before the loss of gold was discovered, each individual who received a certificate and then spent it suffered no loss.

He did suffer a loss upon receiving a certificate, but he didn't know it because nobody knew the certificates were worthless. He then suffered an offsetting gain when he spent the certificate.

All along the way, people were suffering losses and transferring those losses to others. They just didn't know it was happening.

Similarly, you might receive a counterfeit $100 bill and not know it, and then spend it at a store successfully. Only the poor sap who discovers that he holds a counterfeit and consequently decides not to spend it loses in the end.

I doubt the loss of gold would devastate that economy. Some people holding large quantities of the worthless certificates would indeed be personally devastated. However, I would expect that the wealth of that society would already vastly exceed the value of the lost gold, since the people would no doubt be the owners of other physical commodities, capital equipment, trade secrets, and other forms of value.

Gold, like any form of money, does not have to exist in an amount "equal to" the amount of (other) wealth in a society. That's an infantile notion. A single piece of money can be traded thousands of times per second, and can support far more economic activity than its face value would suggest. Money is traded at the margin.

Therefore I agree that the loss shouldn't gum up the entire economy forever, though it could be very stunning and painful until the people recovered from their very real losses.

Re: Alan Watts: Money, Guilt, and the Machine

#39

Post by moneyguilt »

camperman wrote: post #10
StavrosK wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's honour-shame if it's not guilt, though? That's not a rhetorical question.

In honour-shame societies, there is simply no concept of internal remorse or guilt. The correctional vectors are external rather than internal. A member of such a society - and they're almost always collectivist rather then individual - will strive to be honourable while avoiding shame. Here's a Chinese person talking about the difference: "...A majority of the world is Chinese. So am I. We emphasize the extended fam…

Have you read James Bowman's Honor, A History [1] or any of his other writings on this subject [2]?

1- http://www.encounterbooks.com/books/honor

2- http://www.jamesbowman.net/honor.asp

Re: Alan Watts: Money, Guilt, and the Machine

#40

Post by ZenoArrow »

yetanotherphd wrote: post #20

All I see is the assertion that "money isn't real" interspersed with rambling anecdotes.

Alan's lectures tend to cover a lot of ground. There's a bit more to what he's saying here than just 'money isn't real', the lecture also touches on what we give value to, how pursuing money as the route to happiness leads to multiple issues. He touched on guilt in society too, which isn't directly about money, but shows how the way we shape our society affects our individual behaviour, which is linked to what was said about money.
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